Language Development – II

Number of people participated – 141 (People living in India = 43.9% + People living outside India = 56.02%)

99.29% know at least one Indian language. 30.49% know at least two Indian languages. 24.11% know at least three Indian languages.

89.36% have at least one language common with their spouse. Only 4.96% do not have a common Indian language with their spouse. Some people did not explicitly specify the languages the spouse knows and there were some unmarried people. That comes to roughly 5.6%

92.19% of us feel strongly(7 or higher on a scale of 1 – 10, one being the lowest and 10 being the highest) that our children must know at least one Indian language. 3.5% rated it at 5 and 0.7% rated it at 1.

In spite of 89.36% of us having at least one common language with our spouse, and 92.19% feeling strongly about their child speaking an Indian language, only 29.07% of us speak to our children in an Indian language.

I am not specifying the % of children who can talk and understand and Indian language because some were very young children and the number would not be a true representation.

Couple of personal revelations:

After this poll, I have a new gained respect to the standardized polls with restrictive choices. I always thought the generic polls are too foo-foo, but hey one learns something new every day-huh?!

Also I underestimated the power of the blogging mommy network, I did not expect such good turn out. I spent a great deal of time parsing and organizing the data.

I’m sure taken aback that so few of us are actually following through with our intent. Considering that we as a generation are crazed about parenting techniques – read so much about it/blog etc.

It only takes one generation for a language to die out
And the time to strike is when the child is young. Some tips that work for us:
1. Talk to the baby exclusively in mother/father tongue
2. Once the child is fluent in native tongue, introduce English
3. Once the child is relatively fluent in English (for school purposes) switch back to exclusive native language.
4. Make the native language “cool” – listen to movie songs/read bilingual books and keep replying in native tongue even if child is speaking in English
5. Don’t insist on “only” mother tongue – we want the child to naturally pick it and use it because it is also a comfortable way to communicate – not because it’s a “rule” of the house. We want them to LOVE the native language – enjoy the beauty of the vernacular.

Interesting stats, utbt. I can only imagine the amount of work you must’ve gone through to collect and interpret the data in some meaningful way! It is one thing to suspect this is what is happening, and another for me to see the numbers, even if in a small representative sample. Thanks for taking the time and effort!

As Poppy noted, it only takes a generation to forget a language completely. However, it probably takes more than one generation to revive it… Something to think about.

From exchanging notes with friends and cousins, it seems like if literacy part is put in the backseat, at least the language part survives well when growing up in India – thanks to immersion…

awesome job UTBT. sigh – we’re the parents who barely speak in any other language to the kids inspite of knowing over 7. we do however speak a lot of hindi and i hope that makes up for other lapses. the thought of teaching them 7 just makes me want to pull my hair out by the clump!

UTBT SAYS: You guys are doing one at a time and doing it nice and proper. I think that is a commendable situation.